Reddit: The World’s Most Powerful Social Media Site?

This should actually be a long, comprehensive piece detailing the recent meteoric rise, subsequent expansion of power, and reluctant emergence of the site into the same power category as Twitter and even (gulp!) Facebook. The numbers support it. The content is excellent (even though old-school users claim that it’s in decline). Mainstream media and average netizens are starting to take notice.

To do a long story would (apparently) doom the potential that it would be read or even seen by Redditors, so we’ll get to the point.

For those who are unfamiliar, here’s a single stat to put things into perspective: a single popular story I posted on Reddit once received 213K visitors in less than 30 hours from Reddit alone, was picked up as a result by major sites such as Gizmodo, and went on to tally over 350k unique visitors in a week. To compare, a different post on the same site received 2k Facebook shares and almost broke 10k visitors. Don’t even get me started on abysmal Twitter referrals.

When the good people at Sortable emailed our editor this infographic, it was a no-brainer to post. Many Redditors have already seen it, but those who don’t know the story of Reddit should check it out and pay attention. WARNING: If you spend enough time on Reddit, you’ll probably get hooked… or leave in disgust.

7 thoughts on “Reddit: The World’s Most Powerful Social Media Site?”

If I asked everyone I know (most are web and SEO savvy), I’d expect most of them to not know of Reddit, let alone have used it. Occasionally when I find a WordPress blog with a dozen follow buttons below a post, I have to remind myself what the Reddit icon looks like.